BSOD creating image with TrueImage 11

A machine with the latest build of Acronis Trueimage 11 has twice crashed with a Blue Screen of Death while creating a nightly backup image to an external USB2 hard drive.

After the first time, we ran a full pass of CHKDSK on both the
machine's internal drive and the USB drive, checking for bad blocks as
well as directory problems. No trouble found.

The most recent occurrence of this was last night. The following was
logged in the machine's System Event Log:

Source: System Error
Event ID 1003

Error code 000000f4, parameter1 00000003, parameter2 89c498d0,
parameter3 89c49a44, parameter4 805fa160.

We're running the latest build of the software as of the time of
writing, and Windows XP Service Pack 3 and all subsequent updates are
installed.

Can you please suggest where we might go from here?

 

Have a look at:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-43316-Event-ID-1003-error.html

Unfortunately, it might be anything including TI stuff. Are you running the latest version of TI11? You could also try downloading the latest SNAPAPI drivers from Acronis since they are operational in Windows imaging.

RAM is another cause for ID 1003 errors so you could try running memtest86+, free from www.memtest.org ,overnight.

 

Thanks for your reply, seekforever.

I had a look at the thread you linked to, but it looks as if the poster there was having trouble booting his system at all, whereas our situation is that it sometimes crashes when running Trueimage (the system is rock-solid otherwise).

Yes, we're running the latest build of Trueimage 11 (just checked to make sure that was still true!). I'd like to follow up on your suggestion to download the latest SNAPAPI drivers from Acronis though, but I don't see any reference to them on the Acronis website - could you please post a link?

 

Do you have any of Visual Studio software installed, especially SQL server, SQL Express?

Colin

 

Yes, he had a different symptom but the error code was f4 and indicates something like a critical module failure, you just have a different module failing.

I see the problem finding SnapAPI. I found a reference to an update for TI11 here even though the article talks about a different problem.
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/support/kb/articles/995/

There is a link in the solution to the drivers. Maybe somebody can post a better way to find the latest SnapAPI drivers.

 

No, we don't have any of the above, even as components of other software.

We're running SnapAPI 3.3 build 345, and I see that the article you've linked to contains a download for build 359. Will give that a whirl. What does the SnapAPI driver do?

 

All I know is that it is only part of the Windows implementation, it is not in the rescue environment. From that I gather it is part of the Windows live imaging technology and may well contain the pseudo-devices Acronis installs on your PC - you can see them in Device Manager.

 

OK, thanks. It's going to take a couple of days for me to get back to you with news, because the machine it's installed on is at a different site. Thanks, seekforever and bodgy, for your ongoing help.

 

Image creation was successful the first time it was tried with the new SnapAPI drivers installed (although it worked intermittently before as well).

However, the next time I created an image, it failed with the following error:

E00070004: Failed to create data to the archive file. A possible reason might be the poor media quality.​

Definitely an improvement over a Blue Screen of Death, but still not a successful image. I searched the forums for inspiration on this, and wonder whether the USB drive we're saving the image to just can't handle it in some way (although chkdsk /r reports no problems). I've therefore decreased the speed of writing to the drive in the Trueimage's Options dialog, and configured it to split the image file into 650MB chunks (it was using 4.7GB chunks before).

Anything else I might try? Or any other comments?

 

Well, this is disappointing. Another failure, with the error "The archive is corrupted" during verify.

Here's the log file in just-about-readable XML format:

Are we running out of ideas here, guys? Things have gone awfully quiet!

But I'm really reluctant to give up on this, so please - all further ideas gratefully received...

 

Have you tried a different USB drive?

How large is the USB drive?

If you try to manually Validate the image on the USB drive, does the Validation fail at the same place every time or does it fail at different places?

If you create the image on an internal drive or copy the image on the USB drive to an internal drive, does it Validate successfully?

I don't know how large your final image size is, but you might try using 200MB for the splits and seeing if it works.

If you boot to the TI CD and perform the backup to the USB drive, does it Validate successfully from the TI CD? Does it Validate successfully from Windows?

 

For your original BSOD, it is (somewhat) more useful to look up the bug code rather than the event ID

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms797140.aspx

In the left pane scroll down to 0xF4, click on that to see the info on the right.

Something caused a critical system thread to be terminated.

There is also this, which may or may not be relevant to your circumstances:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330100

 

Thanks, MudCrab and JRosenfeld, for your responses. The customer's decided to put this one on hold for a while, so am unable to take things any further. But if and when they decide to come back to this, I will try out your suggestions and let you know the result!